alt Hacker NewsLocal Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home
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This article should be at the core of any discussion about media concentration. The vast consolidation of radio stations is well known, but the same thing has been happening to small local newspapers. In both cases, you end up with a voice speaking to the public from afar, not local people talking to your community about issues that are important to your neighbors.
At that point, most people just go to the gossip corner of social media and spend the rest of their day being fed six hours of outrage.
Rightmove, the property sales website, absolutely destroyed local journalism in the UK. It was written on the wall, but local newspapers had all the local listings for property and other services. A local newspaper was 60%+ of house sales, but that advertising revenue paid for local journalists to sit and read council papers and attend meetings and get people out in the community. Nowadays, local journalism, even from national broadcasters like the BBC is a shadow of its former glory.
I once interviewed for a tech job at the Seattle times. I didn't land the job, but the interview was enlightening. I was told that the investigative reporters at the newspaper did all of the "work" of uncovering news. Subsequently, the TV broadcast station would just report on what the newspaper found. Meanwhile, the broadcast news was raking in tons more ad revenue than the newspaper.
Ever since then, I've often brainstormed of ways to remove all of the layers between the actual investigative reporter and the general public looking for a way to get as much of the revenue directly from the public into the hands of those doing to investigations and reports.
I've had ideas though nothing revolutionary enough to share here. Still, I think the overall goal would be good for literally everyone.
The death of local journalism is fundamentally a revenue problem. My cofounder and I have been working for the last year to find new revenue streams for newspapers at https://seward.presspass.ai/.
Our current hypothesis is that local rewards programs could be a sustainable revenue stream and give the newspaper a way to prove their advertising works with locals.
While trying this out, we've also helped a few papers get up and running - we're calling it "newspaper in a box". Check out a few of the papers we've helped launch: https://sewardfolly.com/ (9 months old) https://homerindependentpress.com/ (2 weeks old).
This is why I subscribe to my local city and regional newspapers. Similar to emailing my representatives about political issues that are of interest to me. It isn't much and I'm just a drop in the ocean but at least it is more than complaining into a void or just reading other's complaints online and getting depressed.
For more local issues I can really feel like I am making a difference. We have sidewalks all the way to my kids' school and a crosswalk now a year after I made it my cause and messaged city planners and councilmen.
So the big issue with the entire business model of journalism is it's just too easy to buy influence.
Jeff Bezos has already reaped many multiples of his investment in the Washington Post.
For more or less a nominal amount of money to him He's able to shape much of our public discourse.
I suspect a volunteer non profit news organization could emerge. But even then, how many skilled journalists are going to be able to work a "real" job too.
Block Communications just closed two papers in Pittsburgh this year. The Post Gazette has been around since 1786. There are fewer and fewer[1] options available and I suspect this is a disturbing trend across many locations.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Newspapers_published_...
It's rare to find local newspapers owned locally, and even rarer to find a local newspaper that's a fair representation of the local population instead of an insulated clique with heavy handed control over what's represented.
Local online forums dedicated to a locality produce more representative content and everyone can participate as long as their isn't a similar controlling clique in charge of moderation. See /r/Seattle and /r/SeattleWA for how moderation manipulates outcomes. Both perspectives are important, but each clique tends to omit what others deem important; leading to topic over-representation/under-representation problems.
There's clearly a loss on long forum informational pieces, but your community is misinformed or misrepresented if those pieces only support the motives of the clique.
In my local, extremely progressive community, Facebook Groups are about 20x more important to democracy than local journalism, which residents genuflect to but provides less value than a replacement-level blog. I love journalism and stick up for it here all the time, but this platitude about local journalism has never rung true to me.
This is a topic close to my heart and I've been working with a small team on a solution for a few years and its finally launching into beta now. Hope it works out. If not, back to the drawing board!
They had a solid podcast interview with journalist Jordan Green on the raise of far-right extremism in the US.
https://buckscountybeacon.com/2025/08/journalist-jordan-gree...
In addition to local journalism, cooperatives are another way democracy can show up close to home. Combining the two, I believe 404Media.co is effectively a journalist-owned outlet (i.e. a worker coop).
Local journalism is important but I am not really sure how to fix it. Lets say we make a big fund to pay for "independent journalism" at the local level. That only works for so long until people get inside with their own axe to grind and take control. The activist class will eventually get in, become managers and corrupt the organization if its a non-profit. If its a political organization it will have political pressures. If it is a for profit it will have financial incentives that probably cant survive in the modern day in small markets.
a geofenced, location verified X-type product would be a good way to bring back local journalism. Users can read, but only have write access if they are within a specific geofence. This would diffuse 'reporting' across the local community - we would have actual citizen reporters which Musk pretends is the case on X - and increase trust that what is happening is actually happening. Tried to build this a decade ago but tech wasn't there. Maybe time has come now?
There's this idea that Democracy and Journalism are intrinsically linked (thanks John Milton), but they're not. Look at the history of Democracy (by that of course we mean representative democracy): it has existed long before, and independent from, Journalism. Then look at the history of Journalism: it has always been a partisan affair, funded, written, and published by people who want to get their own point across. The idea that truth emerges from freedom of speech ignores the fact that the speaker can lie, or that different people view different things as true.
The romantic idea of Journalism as a bastion of Democracy conveniently ignores the facts. Democracy is a form of Government, and Government is power exerted on people. You don't get more power or influence because you heard about a thing happening. And most people will never do anything about what they hear. The real purpose of Journalism is to galvanize the public's feelings based on a selective viewpoint towards a specific aim. An article is written, using selective information, presented in a particular way, in order to effect a change the writer wants. If effective, the writer gets what they want, or something close to it.
Journalism is just another form of power. But it's not power of the people. It's power using the people. You and the rest of the people have no power of your own. But as a group, the people are wielded by institutions (Journalism, Religion, Party, Industry, Culture, etc) to act on behalf of those institutions. The group can try to push back on power. But without organization, leadership, clear goals, and strong motivation, there's no effective opposition. So occasionally the group will take on these qualities, and becomes... another institution, wielding power to get its way. And as a group with power, the results are not always positive for everyone (see: Anti-Saloon League, National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, etc)
I think we can safely the problem isn't lack of information at the local or national level. The problem is nobody is taking action on it when informed. It takes only 1 person to report a problem but the responsibility to take action is swallowed by the void, noise and we the people are helpless.
In my experience, local reporting has stagnated so badly that they now survive by kissing up to whoever is in power. The majority of pieces are puff pieces commissioned by the subject or friend of the subject, be it a school superintendent or local town council or what have you.
And yes, the bias is heavily to the left. I am very centrist in my views so a left or right leaning bias would be upsetting.
We live across the river from Bucks County PA in NJ, Bucks County journalism and the NJ equivalent are just shills.
Further reading on this, very worthwhile IMHO: Paper Girl by Beth Macy, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_Girl
Centralisation generally leads to efficiency, but when pushed to far it will corrode core human values.
Democratic processes will always have to contend with the messiness of humans, and we have to find a balance. Currently I feel the consolidations in many aspect of modern society has been pushed to far. If we keep pushing, we end up in an authoritarian or fascistic state with no wiggle room for the squishy humannesses that is the pesky, but unavoidable ingredient in a vibrant and free democratic society.
Local journalism has an incentive to serve its audience as they are easily held accountable as such. These media conglomerates do not. They can just shut something down without a care when they disagree with a population and publish unpopular slop (crime news, engagement bait, whatever), and it's suddenly unprofitable.
As someone who lives in the Bucks County, Pennsylvania that Stu Faigen calls home, I say that half of the county, which is about 325,000 people, should agree but will disagree because of how strident his politics generally are in favor of politicians and causes from one side of the aisle.
I say "his politics" but I mean his and those of the other contributors and staff of the Bucks County Beacon. It is a who's who of radical-left Bucks County politics.
You can't look at the decline in journalism in our country without looking at how one-sided the coverage provided by the journalists has been for the last 40 or 50 years.
If journalists had taken a neutral political position and called out wrong doing equally, they'd have at least 2x the paying subscriber base now.
Who knows how that would have affected the secular decline to this point?
If local journalism doesn’t exist in your town or city, start it.
On the contrary, I think we are entering a new golden age of local journalism in the US, but it does not look like the old one, so we do not recognize it yet.
What is collapsing is the legacy institutional model. What is emerging is a procedural one: individuals showing up locally, documenting power directly, publishing primary evidence, and forcing accountability through visibility rather than prestige.
Projects like Honor Your Oath, Long Island Audit, Guerilla Media, and even single-person operations with a camera and FOIA literacy are doing real journalism. They attend meetings, record encounters, publish receipts, and focus on consequences that are immediate and specific.
The cost of presence is now low. The cost of obscurity for local officials is higher. Credibility increasingly comes from raw evidence rather than narrative authority. These outlets are not trying to inform everyone. They are informing the people affected directly.
It feels messy, personal, and sometimes abrasive because it is not professionalized in the old sense. Historically, that is what journalism looked like before it was institutionalized.
For example, Jeff Gray quietly stands in public with a “God Bless Homeless Vets” sign. People often assume he is homeless and attempt to violate his rights, frequently including police officers. The resulting interactions, all on camera, expose how poorly basic constitutional rights are understood or respected at the local level. https://youtu.be/-um41lMH3c4
Ronald Durbin of Guerilla Media is a muckraker in the classic sense, repeatedly confronting local power structures in person. He recently had a gun drawn on him at a town council meeting. https://youtube.com/@guerrillapublishing
Sean Reyes from Long Island Audit has been arrested multiple times for filming inside police station lobbies despite clear New York law allowing it, and has been physically attacked and had firearms brandished at him while attempting interviews, all documented on video. https://youtube.com/@longislandaudit
There are so many others. This is what local journalism looks like now.
https://youtube.com/@lacklustermedia
https://youtube.com/@audittheaudit
https://youtube.com/@amagansettpress
https://youtube.com/@susanbassi
Many, many others.
Here are lawyers giving their perspectives on these interactions:
https://youtube.com/@southerndrawllaw
https://youtube.com/@thecivilrightslawyer
...and the more government is local, the more local journalism means a damn thing.
Did anyone read the article? This is obvious AI Slop. A million em dashes and tons of other chatgpt-isms are all over. This isn't journalism - it's nonsense.
This is a "reader" submitted article and not written by the staff at the paper. I'm surprised they didn't give it more due diligence though.
Liberal values can't be preserved in the midst of a Pharaonic distribution of wealth. The only way to defend liberal values is to fight for socialism.
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"Unless the journalism is too critical, then they're far-right/far-left agitators"
The murder of Twitter seems to be a part of a greater scheme of things.
The problem with local journalism is simple: the product is produces is not worth what it costs to produce it.
This has _always_ been true, but for generations classified ad revenue neatly subsidized it. Once the internet came along and blew up that revenue stream, the industry was in trouble.
I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this. Everyone will go on the internet and talk about how valuable people sitting in city council meetings is, but not enough people want to pay the monthly bill to enable that.